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science writing that celebrates the amazing world we live in and our scientific understanding of it
Recent Posts Tagged With 'science and religion'
hidden factors
In my last post, I tried to emphasize the difference between the evolution and climate change debates. I made a joke about god being less easily measured than sea ice. I was mostly trying to emphasize that we ought to all be able to come to a basic a...
Darwin, Wallace and consciousness
There are several reasons why Charles Darwin got more credit for the theory of natural selection than did his contemporary Alfred Russel Wallace, who entertained some rather similar thoughts on the subject. I think it is well established that Darwin'...
debating evolution
As you can see, I've stuck up an icon for the Blog for Darwin carnival. Please click on it if you want to help celebrate the 200th anniversary of Darwin's birthday (12th Feb) by writing a post or just reading the resulting "blog swarm." Thanks to eTr...
anthropocentric arguments
Before we get to part 3 of my extended discussion about quantum weirdness, I want to look at the apparent anthropocentricity of the Copenhagen interpretation. Dedicated readers :-) will recall from my previous post that the Copenhagen interpretation ...
science, religion and society
There are several obvious ways in which the pursuit of scientific knowledge is different from the quest for religious truth. I think one interesting way to approach this is to consider the relationship between the scientific or religious individual a...
science, religion and cargo cults
As I was driving in to work, an Oxford prof named Harvey Whitehouse was being interviewed on the radio. He is an anthropologist interested in the cognitive science of religion. Although he nowadays gets to think about these things amid the dreaming s...
I missed my own birthday!
Yesterday, Gumby indirectly reminded me of my own birthday - 25 December, 1642 by the old-style Julian calendar that was still in effect in Protestant Europe back then. He reprinted a joke politically-correct piece of legalese to appease anyone who m...
pythagorus' trousers by margaret wertheim
Pythagorus' Trousers doesn't show up on amazon.com, but I assume it is still in print since it appears on the publisher's website. I came across it in a second-hand bookstore and I was so happy to have discovered it because it is totally my kind of b...
science and the meaning of life
30 day tour of the world of science - day 28Well my 30 day tour is nearing its end. The idea has been to write about science that is fundamentally important to each of us. Usually people think of this in terms of science serving humanity through tech...
the debate continues
While debating Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution in 1860, Sam Wilberforce famously asked Thomas Huxley from which side of his family did he claim descent from monkeys. Huxley replied that he “would rather be descended from an ape than from a c...
the beauty of simplicity and complexity
There are people who don’t believe in the kinds of truths that science claims to offer. There is of course a whole spectrum here, from scientists who don’t think other scientists have adequately proved their results, to religious individuals who ...
science and religion
Science has shown that we live in a physical world that is governed by certain laws. Now it is true that science can only describe those aspects of the world that demonstrate reproducibility and that there might therefore be “paranormal” phenomen...
